The Dumbest Story Ever Writtenby John Chuckman
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 1, 2005

Devoted
to human freedom, you must embrace even the freedom to express
stupidity. So I can happily report that a week ago at this writing
Thomas Friedman struck a mighty blow for freedom with one of the
dumbest columns he has ever written, "Giving the Hatemongers No Place
to Hide" (NY Times, July 22, 2005 ), although his regular
readers may not forgive my distinguishing this column from his regular
output.

The theme of the column is captured by
one of the pithy bromides of which he is so fond, "Guess what: words
matter." To make sure that you understand, Friedman repeats this a
number of times with slight variations, a favorite technique of
propagandists and, for that matter, police interrogators. You can't
help smiling for here is a man who has spent his entire adult life
twisting and torturing words to give imperial hubris a happy face.

As we will see, the words that really
matter to Friedman are the ones that disagree with his view of the
world and current events. Like an unpleasant, spoiled child Friedman
uses a tantrum in print to get what he wants.

Friedman starts in his usual breezy,
know-it-all style, "I wasn't surprised…. And I won't be surprised…" at
discoveries by English police at a bookstore in Leeds. These include
video games, Islamic video games. Friedman ominously explains, "The
video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and
opponents." I couldn't help thinking of General Ripper darkly telling
a stunned Peter Sellers as Mandrake about fluoride, children, and
water in Doctor Strangelove. Good God, Friedman lives in a
country up to its armpits in violent video games, violent books and
magazines, violent music, and a hell of a lot more genuine violence
than the English can even imagine.

Friedman asks, "If the primary terrorism
problem we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of
ideas within Islam - a war between life-affirming Muslims against
those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death
cult - what can the rest of us do?"

Note the cheap trick here of identifying
Islam in general with the world's terrorism problem even while
ostensibly distinguishing between life-affirming and death-cult
Muslims. Islam in general bears the burden of correction for its
minority of extremists. These are the words of someone with murky and
undeclared motives.

Terrorism, like any other criminal
behavior, is the sole responsibility of those committing the acts, not
of the religion or the people with which they happen to be associated.
The number of people involved in events in New York was about twenty.
The number in London maybe a dozen. The world has about a billion
Muslims. Friedman simply has no shame.

He glosses over, another favorite
technique of Friedman's, the death-cult wing of every religion,
letting it apply only to Islam. What about lunatics in America who
turn Christianity into death cults like those of Jim Jones (900
deaths) or Waco (about 100 deaths)? There are dozens of these, not to
mention the weird Aryan-nation people who live in the woods and
mountains armed to the teeth. American fundamentalists have gathered
innumerable times on hillsides awaiting the end of the world. Many of
them stocked their basements with guns, ammo, and freeze-dried
provisions awaiting the calamity that was supposed to occur when the
calendar turned to the year 2000. What about the pictures of Marines
earnestly kneeling at some make-shift alter in Iraq before they head
out to kill people? What about America's Eric Rudolphs? its Timothy
McVeighs?

And how can you apply the adjective
life-affirming to thousands of ferociously angry settlers in Gaza
determined to rip down every brick in place, cut down every tree, root
up every vine, people who have been widely reported to be poisoning
the land they will have to surrender? It seems to me that Israel
itself represents the focus of just such a struggle going on in
Judaism, the only difference between it and what we see in Islam being
one of numbers.

One thing is certain, if you tried
smearing Judaism in general with the bloody excesses of Israeli
settlers or charming figures like the late bloodthirsty Rabbi Kahane
and his followers, you'd call down a firestorm of anti-Semitism
accusations on your head. Yet this is precisely what Friedman feels
perfectly free to do with Islam.

Friedman answers his own question, as he
always does, another technique familiar to propagandists the world
over, "We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it
appears. The State Department produces an annual human rights report.
Henceforth, it should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report,
which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are
inciting violence against others."

If he stopped at the first sentence,
he'd have my support. There is a need to shine light on hatred,
genuine hatred, something that is abundant in Friedman's homeland.
Radio, television, and newspaper columns pour out hatred in the United
States around the clock. Dozens of columnists and commentators spew
the stuff. Actually, it is this cacophony of hate pervading American
media that allows people like Friedman to pass for reasonable, but he
is not reasonable by comparison with what is heard and read in other
Western countries.

The State Department's annual human
rights report is a document with ghastly shortcomings. Perhaps
Friedman likes it because it reflects many of his own qualities -
arrogant, insulting, inaccurate, and deliberately incomplete. Everyone
outside the United States recognizes the report as biased and used
mainly as a bludgeon against countries from which the United States
seeks concessions of some kind, usually economic. Incomplete? Just ask
Amnesty International, the United States itself very much belongs on
any such list compiled without bias: police and prison brutality there
are routine, daily events.

Having laid down a principle that seems
plausible, Friedman goes on with another of his favorite techniques,
casually stretching a principle beyond recognition, trying to make it
fit a case it plainly does not fit. Friedman says, "We also need to
spotlight the 'excuse makers,' the former State Department spokesman
James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse
makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or
Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just
one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be
exposed."

Events in London and New York are not
related to Iraq or Israel or imperialism? Then why is Bush's mob
intensely pressuring Sharon to quickly complete the evacuation of
Gaza? And why are the Bush people suddenly talking about troop
reductions in Iraq after all the "stay the course" blather? Of course,
they're related. "It's the injustice, stupid!" should be on a plaque
over Friedman's desk.

Here is some of what Friedman is
actually saying in this passage. He doesn't care that lists themselves
are chilling things, having such horrible associations as the NKVD's
lists for arrest, Senator McCarthy's lists of Communists, and Nixon's
enemies' list (disproportionately featuring Jews). We need a list of
"despicable" excuse makers.

And never mind, he is saying, that such
lists always are abused. America's no-fly list contains thousands of
names included in error or by deliberate abuse, and there is almost no
way for individuals to remove their names from this job-threatening
list. One of the earliest abuses discovered was Ted Kennedy's name on
the list, but most people do not have Senator Kennedy's influence to
have their names easily removed.

The most frightening thing Friedman is
saying is that people who discuss terror and its causes in terms other
than his own are "despicable." Yes, words matter, and despicable
is a very strong word, a hate-word if there ever was one.

So here is Friedman saying he hates
people who disagree with his way of thinking on a subject, blithely
managing to identify the people he hates with haters. This reminds me
of the time Friedman, in true 1984 Inner Party fashion, tried to get
suicide-bomber and all associated terms expunged from the
English language, even advocating official penalties for heads of
governments in the Middle East who dared use the word martyr.

Friedman is also saying, as he has so
many times, that large numbers of people act irrationally. They blow
themselves up for no good reason, just for hate. He says, "There is no
political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21. As the Middle East
expert Stephen P. Cohen put it: 'These terrorists are what they do.'
And what they do is murder."

This is demonstrably false.

Most haters are averse to killing
themselves. Haters are generally cowards. Hitler went on until the
Russians were almost at the bunker door and only killed himself for
fear of falling into their hands. Stalin was only stopped by Nature's
good timing or secret assassination from launching yet another wave of
arrests. I don't know of a single instance of those lynching thousands
of black Americans who gave up their lives to get at their object of
hate. America's "Reverend" Jimmy Swaggart threatened to kill any
homosexual making a pass at him and weekly spurs his flock to hatred,
but he has never offered to lay his own life down for the cause of his
seething hatred.

On the other hand, has anyone ever
described the Russians who laid down their lives in waves to stop
Hitler as haters? I've never seen the Japanese Kamikaze pilots who
tried desperately to stop the U.S. from reaching their homeland
described as haters.

Something is desperately wrong with
Friedman's way of looking at things, and if people like him win the
struggle for hearts and minds, the ugly Patriot Act will be only the
smallest reason for truth no longer having a place in America.

Maybe that Joe Stalin mustache Friedman
sports represents more than a cosmetic effort to add some character to
his face?

John
Chuckman lives in Canada and is
former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. Copyright (C)
2005 by John Chuckman.